The United States is reportedly sending dozens of Department of Homeland (DHS) security agents and investigators to Guatemala to help stem the flow of unauthorized migration from Central America to the U.S. Anonymous U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation said DHS personnel will advise Guatemalan police and migration authorities on how to halt human smuggling.

There are currently some 3.7 million refugees and migrants from Venezuela worldwide, the vast majority in Latin America and the Caribbean. Given the worsening political, economic, human rights and humanitarian situation in Venezuela, the UN Refugee Agency, now considers that the majority of those fleeing the country are in need of international refugee protection.

In an era of increasingly polarized politics, there are few issues as divisive as President Trump’s proposal to build a physical wall across part of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border. Shirin Ghaffary writes in Vox that there is another kind of border wall increasingly being talked about — one that proponents pitch as being less costly, less disruptive, and less politically controversial than a physical barrier: a so-called “smart wall.”

President Donald Trump is scheduled to announce his long-awaited proposal on immigration Thursday, a plan that aims to move the immigration approval process away from family-ties and humanitarian needs. Administration official said the plan will bolster border security and create a merit-based system, insisting that it is a “competitiveness issue.”

In the 43 years between 1975 and 2017, terrorists — foreign-born, native-born, and unknown – killed 3,518 Americans on U.S. soil (this includes the 9/11 attacks). During the same period, about 800,000 Americans were killed in homicides. Overall, the chance of being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist between 1975 and 2017 was about 1 in 3.8 million per year. The author of a new report says that the main lesson from the report is that there are very few terrorists of any ideology or origin who pose a threat to Americans on U.S. soil, and even fewer who manage to murder Americans. “The ideology, frequency, deadliness, and origins of terrorists are fascinating,” the author says, but these numbers are so small that it is difficult “to be overwhelmed by fear.”

A critical element of any future immigration reform will be the legalization of illegal immigrants. Previous immigration reform proposals have failed, largely because policymakers disagreed over whether and how to legalize illegal immigrants. Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier write in a Cato Institute policy brief that future immigration reform proposals must be different from previous proposals if there is any hope of them becoming law. Past legalization reforms introduced by members of Congress were too similar to one another. They all failed. Our proposals provide three new means for legalizing illegal immigrants that will overcome some of the main political objections in the past: 1) Legalizing immigrants through a tiered system, whereby illegal immigrants can choose to either be legalized quickly and cheaply without the ability to gain citizenship in the future or begin a lengthier and expensive path toward citizenship; 2) Rolling legalization by allowing long-term illegal immigrant residents to legalize their status on an ongoing basis without an application cutoff date; and 3) Slowing chain immigration by limiting legalized immigrants’ ability to sponsor family members from overseas for lawful permanent residency (LPR) or green cards.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU the other day asked a federal court to rule without trial that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry without a warrant.

DHS is considering housing migrant children at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay to help deal with a sharp increase in the number of immigrants crossing the U.S. southern border.The idea was first proposed earlier this year as DHS looked for military facilities in which to hold undocumented immigrants as they wait for their cases to be processed. There are no immediate plans to bring children to Guantanamo Bay, and officials admit that the optics of housing children next to terrorists would be problematic.

A new report estimates that the smuggling of unlawful migrants from the Northern Triangle region of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—to the United States generated between $200 million and $2.3 billion for human smugglers in 2017.

Just a week ago, President Donald Trump appeared poised to take the drastic step of closing the U.S.-Mexico border to both trade and travel. But on 4 April, the president backpedaled and instead gave Mexico a year to stop the flow of drugs across the border. If that didn’t happen, he threatened, auto tariffs would be imposed – and the president suggested he might still close the border if that didn’t work. If Trump ever follows through on his threat and puts up a closed sign at the southern border, it wouldn’t be the first time. Twice in the last half-century the U.S. has tried to use the border to force Mexico to bend to America’s will. The ruse failed both times.

The various U.S. aid programs in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, programs funded to address the causes of mass migration to the United States, are “not doing enough,” President Donald Trump said Friday, announcing that the aid programs to these three countries was being cut off. The announcement came amid a surge of immigrants crossing the border, prompting Trump to announce and this he week he might close the entire U.S.-Mexico border if Mexico did not do more to stem the flow of immigrants.

Law enforcement organizations across the United States have recently arrested multiple people charged with various crimes that include organizing, operating or paying for services from human trafficking rings. “Human trafficking is not synonymous with human smuggling,” notes one expert.

An important issue in current American political discourse is the effect that immigrants have on the communities in which they settle. While this topic has received significant attention, the focus has generally been on the short-term effects of immigrants. A new study finds that U.S. counties with more historical immigration have higher incomes, less poverty, and lower unemployment today.

The long view

For more than twenty years, a little-noticed provision of U.S. law allowing for the transfer of asylum seekers to a third country for processing lay dormant, until late last month when the United States and Guatemala signed an agreement that essentially replicates Australia’s so-called “offshore-processing” system. The U.S.-Guatemala agreement represents a far different choice of policy direction than a “safe third country” agreement. Rather, bears a striking resemblance to Australia’s “regional processing” agreement with Nauru, a tiny island country in Micronesia where Australia sends those attempting to travel to the country by boat seeking asylum.

Last year, Stephanie Leutert traveled to the Guatemalan highlands to visit the towns that were sending the most people per capita to the United States. She was curious about why Guatemalans were leaving their communities and what factors contributed to these decisions. In each town, she never found a single answer but, rather, various overlapping reasons that included a changing climate, low wages, few opportunities for employment, a desire for family reunification, distrust in political leaders and a lack of safety, among others. Yet there was one unexpected theme that she kept hearing about in the highlands: a changing coffee sector and low international coffee prices.

Media outlets reported this week that an international student at Harvard University was deported back to Lebanon after border agents in Boston searched his electronic devices and confronted him about his friends’ social media posts. EFF argues that these allegations raise serious concerns about whether the government is following its own policies regarding border searches of electronic devices, and the constitutionality of these searches and of social media surveillance by the government.

Worries about the effects of immigration are prevalent in politics across Europe and the U.S. In the U.K., for instance, concerns over immigration dominate much of the Brexit debate. For many, immigrants are seen as a source of competition for jobs and access to public services (irrespective of whether this is true or not). Peter Howley writes in The Conversation that despite the intuitive appeal of this argument, empirical evidence to support it is lacking. The explanation for the negative perception of immigration is rather found in subjective well-being, and the effects of immigration on subjective well-being were found to be more negative and more notable in certain subgroups. These groups include relatively older people (those over 60), those with low household incomes, and/or the unemployed. “The main concern with these findings is that if – despite positive economic benefits– immigration is associated with adverse effects on the subjective well-being of certain groups in society, then this makes the challenge of integration more difficult,” Howley writes.

Worries about the effects of immigration are prevalent in politics across Europe and the U.S. In the U.K., for instance, concerns over immigration dominate much of the Brexit debate. For many, immigrants are seen as a source of competition for jobs and access to public services (irrespective of whether this is true or not). Peter Howley writes in The Conversation that despite the intuitive appeal of this argument, empirical evidence to support it is lacking. The explanation for the negative perception of immigration is rather found in subjective well-being, and the effects of immigration on subjective well-being were found to be more negative and more notable in certain subgroups. These groups include relatively older people (those over 60), those with low household incomes, and/or the unemployed. “The main concern with these findings is that if – despite positive economic benefits– immigration is associated with adverse effects on the subjective well-being of certain groups in society, then this makes the challenge of integration more difficult,” Howley writes.

Worries about the effects of immigration are prevalent in politics across Europe and the U.S. In the U.K., for instance, concerns over immigration dominate much of the Brexit debate. For many, immigrants are seen as a source of competition for jobs and access to public services (irrespective of whether this is true or not). Peter Howley writes in The Conversation that despite the intuitive appeal of this argument, empirical evidence to support it is lacking. The explanation for the negative perception of immigration is rather found in subjective well-being, and the effects of immigration on subjective well-being were found to be more negative and more notable in certain subgroups. These groups include relatively older people (those over 60), those with low household incomes, and/or the unemployed. “The main concern with these findings is that if – despite positive economic benefits– immigration is associated with adverse effects on the subjective well-being of certain groups in society, then this makes the challenge of integration more difficult,” Howley writes.